What to do with worries that you aren’t allowed to have? Worries that seem minuscule and risible compared to the weighty concerns that others bravely bear?

If you are woken by nightmares about choosing the wrong taps and thus ruining your bathroom and, by extension, your life and the life of those you love, the bile-like flavour of anxiety may be pungent on your tongue as you imagine being pilloried for poor taste by some supreme faucet judge. Yet it may be wise to keep this under your hat. Few will sympathise and, of those who don’t, the responses may be brutal. Protesting “my pain is real” may not endear you to your friends while the caring professionals at the end of the telephone may just laugh you off the line.

Yet I always try to listen to problems that are a bit recherché, a mite ludicrous, without judgement. “My head’s a bad neighbourhood – you shouldn’t go there alone at night,” a famously carefree Hollywood star, fresh from the surf, recently said in an interview, and although it was hard to believe, believe it we must.

Some friends of friends who live in a massive, thriving, stately home once confessed to me that because there were so many members of staff – some of whom had been in the employ of the house for more than 50 years – they had no privacy. They had no down time, no sofa suppers, no dressing gown life. They must all emerge from their bedrooms, including the five children, washed, brushed, and dressed for the stage, as it were. Their breakfast is never grabbed in the kitchen but always served in the dining room, yes, from silver-domed dishes. They’re not quite allowed to get their own cups of tea. If they do, there may be mild scolding and hurt feelings, recriminations.

“Poor you!” I begin. Who’s to say which worries count and which do not? It’s not a competition, or not a competition one would wish to win at any rate.

“Thanks,” they say. “It’s not terrible. It’s just sometimes ...”

“I know,” I soothe, as they hatch a plan for a holiday to a remote cottage whose chief lure is that it comes with not one soul within a mile.

One of the mothers from my daughter’s nursery had a quite splendidly recherché problemette. As her family are in restaurants, they sometimes invite the number two chef from, say, a famous European hotel to come and work in their house for a few months. The chefs perfect their ideas and develop their own signature styles. I once went to this house for lunch with some toddlers and the chef came out and asked what we’d like. “We have everything,” he declared.

“Could we have some grilled john dory please,” the little boy of the house said. “And some steamed spinach, thanks.” The meal arrived with freshly baked focaccia and was followed by three flavours of ice-cream freshly churned. “Wow!” I said. “How amazing!”

. . .

You’d think!” The mother replied. “The thing is, the chefs are so temperamental. They freak if I’m not hungry. If we go out for dinner, they sulk for days. If one of them isn’t happy, the whole household knows about it. You can practically tell from the other end of the street when they’re in bad moods. I dread coming home sometimes. I wish they would just go away. It’s like there’s a mountain of angry food constantly hovering over my head trying to attack me.”

“Oh no!” I say. “That must feel, er, well, really overwhelming.”

Another acquaintance remarked to me recently with a very heavy sigh, “My husband’s perfect but sometimes when we go out with friends, sometimes but not always by any means, he can be really quite quiet.”

“Oh no! How, er, difficult.”

“I know. I can’t really blame him, I just really wish that he’d get over it.”

Yet I don’t really expect anyone to be overly concerned about my latest bout of petty fretting. It’s scarcely a matter of life and death. We all have our health, we haven’t gone bust, but I can’t help noticing that I agreed to be in the play that I’m writing without in any way realising it will mean learning about 75 pages of a book off by heart. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I half wonder if I was even conscious.

It was quite an oversight. It’s possible that with no training or practice in this area, it just may not be possible. It might take all summer to learn upwards of 20,000 words. It might take the rest of my life. But when you’ve longed all your life to star in a show and someone asks you, you don’t get fancy with the details. You have to assume you can do it. Generally things turn out OK. Don’t they? And what’s the absolute worst that could happen?

Oh Lordy.

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt